My Name: Matthew Sanborn Smith. My challenge: Write 1000 stories by the time I'm 50 years old. Current story count: 158. Current age: 47. (Yes, I know it will never happen. I push on regardless.)
The One-Thousand is made up of stories that are aimed at publication in professional venues.
I've been published at Tor.com, Nature, and Chizine, among others. Listen to me on the occasional StarShipSofa and every single Beware the Hairy Mango. Shoot me an e-mail at upwithgravity@gmail.com

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Porn 2.0

PORN 2.0by Matthew Sanborn Smith

When people didn't want the same things, when people weren't even people anymore, what was a purveyor of sexy goodness to do? Since they unlocked the secret in 2034, what was once humanity had broken into thousands of new species, if you could call them species. Many of them refused to reproduce in the old fashioned way, that is, the way which had kept Tommy Jarvis and his family in business for decades: plain ole gettin' it on.

The porn industry was largely dead. The once multi-billion dollar industry knew exactly what its audience had wanted until they hadn't wanted it any longer. What was left fought over the scraps of fundamentalist mankind, but Tommy, sweet Tommy had vowed to rise again. He knew the essence of good porn and knew that sex was nothing but a format. Pornography was defined simply as whatever was privately desired and socially forbidden.

The aquatics liked looking at eggs. Not chicken, the fishy kind, you know. Millions and millions of eggs, the more the better, all shiny and translucent, oh man, they're probably getting hot just reading this.

The cyborgs dug robots, but the robots got into efficiency. Show the robots a program that was so efficient, some law of physics would have to be broken to pull it off and you, my friend, would have a mess to clean up.

Rudy, the Species of One, only needed a mirror. The men of wax enjoyed having hot nipples poured on them. There was a thriving market among some asexual perverts in watching films of two separate cells joining together to form one larger cell (you'd have to run the video backwards, but Tommy would always tell them they were watching the real thing as it happened). Hive minds enjoyed watching free-thinking individuals engage in auto-eroticism. Tommy rooted out every kink in the post-Homo sapiens society. He became a very rich man, not only by giving beings what they wanted, but by keeping it quiet as well.

The sentient gas giants? Well, you'd never hear this from Tommy, but word was they found old Alka-Seltzer ads highly erotic.